Aggregating User Input in Ecology Citizen Science Projects
(2015)

Camera traps (remote, automatic cameras) are revolutionizing large-scale studies in ecology. The Serengeti Lion Project has used camera traps to produce over 1.5 million pictures of animals in the Serengeti. To analyze these pictures, the Project created Snapshot Serengeti, a citizen science website where volunteers can help classify animals. To increase accuracy, each photo is shown to multiple users and a critical step is aggregating individual classifications. In this paper, we present a new aggregation algorithm which achieves an accuracy of 98.6%, better than many human experts. Our algorithm also requires fewer users per photo than existing methods. The algorithm is intuitive and designed so that nonexperts can understand the end results. Ecology seeks to understand the interrelationships of species with one another and with their environment. Monitoring many species of animals simultaneously has traditionally been very difficult. Camera traps (remote, automatic cameras) are revolutionizing ecological research by providing a non-invasive, cost-effective approach for large-scale monitoring. Ecologists are currently using these traps in the Serengeti National Park, one of the world’s last large intact natural areas, to understand the dynamics of its dozens of large mammals (Swanson et al. 2014). As of November 2013, the ecologists have spent 3 years using more than 200 cameras spread over 1,125 square kilometers to take more than 1.5 million photos. In order to process so many images, the ecologists, along with Zooniverse (a citizen science platform), created Snapshot Serengeti, a web site where over 35,000 volunteers helped classify the species in the photos (Zooniverse 2014a). Since volunteers can make mistakes, each photo is shown to multiple users. A critical step is to combine these classifications into one aggregate classification: e.g., if 4 out of 5 users classify a photo as containing a zebra, we might ⇤These authors are part of the Zooniverse project, funded in part by MICO. Copyright c 2015, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. decide that the photo does indeed contain a zebra. In this paper, we develop an aggregation algorithm for Snapshot Serengeti. Classification aggregation is an active area in machine learning; however, we show that much of the existing literature is based on assumptions which do not apply to Snapshot Serengeti, and must therefore develop a novel approach. 1 In addition, current machine learning work on classification aggregation often draws on ideas such as expectation maximization and Bayesian reasoning. While powerful, these methods obscure the connection between input and results, making it hard for non-machine learning experts to understand the end results. Thus, our algorithm must be both accurate and intuitive. Our paper proceeds as follows. We begin by discussing Snapshot Serengeti and previous machine learning literature on classifier aggregation. We then discuss why much of this existing work is not applicable to Snapshot Serengeti. We next introduce a new classifier aggregation algorithm for Snapshot Serengeti and compare it against the current algorithm. Finally, we conclude and discuss possible future work.